Originally published in News from the Ninth Floor, the montlhy newsletter of the Department of Anthropology at John Jay College. A full-length article about the 2019 Puerto Rican uprising is in the works, and will be presented at the Comparative Politics Workshop of the Department of Political Science at The Graduate Center in April.
A long-time student of Puerto Rico’s culture and politics, I had closely followed the “July Days” of 2019 from afar and via social media. I was in Portugal, of all places, on July 24 when then governor Ricardo Rosselló finally announced over social media that he would step down on August 2. I immediately decided to travel home to Puerto Rico to conduct preliminary research on the situation, to establish new contacts and to hold informal conversations with old ones as soon as the schedule of classes allowed a little breathing room. It would be two months before I was able to make the trip.
The ride home from Luis Muñoz Marín Airport in early October was a little anti-climactic. I almost expected the streets to be flooded with visible signs of rebellion. Disappointed, I conversed with the close friend who picked me up, not looking to see if the large, public mural with periodically shifting messages of “resistance” and featuring the black-and-white Puerto Rican flag was still there. The black-and-white flag is a symbol widely used by those who oppose Puerto Rico’s colonial status ever since an unelected fiscal control board was put in place by the U.S. Congress to decide the Caribbean territory’s economic policy in 2016. The control board is known locally as “La Junta,” a direct reference to the oppressive military-political forces that have long dominated Latin America. The mural with the flag is still there, I later discovered.
According to those I talked with over the following days, in early July people continued to live their normal lives even as tensions began to mount. There was outrage when the leaked contents of a series of conversations in an online “chat” platform revealed that the governor and members of his inner circle had joked cynically at the expense of Hurricane María’s estimated 4645 fatalities. At the very same time, evidence of the political corruption and administrative mismanagement that contributed to those deaths continued to surface. As scholars and other observers have noted, these “private” derisions by so-called public servants were experienced by the public as a profound violation of some of the most deeply-held traditional norms of respeto (“respect”) binding together social relations among different social strata in Puerto Rican society (García-Quijano and Lloréns 2019).
It was almost instantly after the conversations were leaked that hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans took to the streets. Cyberspace became flooded with the battle cry #RickyRenuncia (“Ricky, Resign!”). The vast numbers surprised even the first handful of seasoned protesters who trickled out alone on the first day or two. For nearly two weeks and lasting well into the night, there were massive, daily protests encircling the governor’s mansion. Protesters repeatedly shut down the major shopping mall in San Juan. Each night at 11pm, police attempted to end the demonstrations by dispersing protesters with tear gas and rubber bullets. The police were met with resistance from large numbers of small, very combative groups of mostly young people, unprecedented in Puerto Rico. Thousands of motorcycle riders, many from the public housing residenciales, a social sector long considered politically dormant and complacent by many among Puerto Rico’s professional-dominated, pro-independence left, also turned up repeatedly and frequently. They reportedly played a key role in enabling the demonstrations to keep going into the early dawn.
Rosselló’s own New Progressive Party (PNP) turned against him in part because the governor and others on the chat had disparaged the Party’s own voters. In a matter of days, the PNP-controlled legislature announced it would commence impeachment procedures if Rosselló did not step down. After some delay, he finally did, installing a successor in yet another move fraught with legal controversy that soon led to the naming of a third governor in just a handful of days. After that, the mass protests died down even though people lived with great uncertainty in a situation with little resolution.
I traveled the urban spine of San Juan from Cupey to Santurce on foot and by public transport, which is decidedly not the average insider’s point of view in the sprawling car-centered landscape of Puerto Rico’s “Metro Area.” Given I don’t have a driver’s license, I had no choice. My walking ethnography had its definite observational perks, enabling me to see what might otherwise have sped by in a car. My first impressions off the plane from New York did not dramatically change: everything seemed “normal.” There were the same shuttered, empty businesses, and homes covered in graffiti tags and peeling paint that I’ve seen on each visit since moving to New York in 2014.
Yet, if the visual signs of either rebellion or renewal were few and far between during my October visit, I did not have to wait long for signs of conflict stirring barely below the surface. For example, during my stay, unknown individuals firebombed the office of a small, private-sector rank-and-file labor union with a string of recent strike victories under its belt. Among the union’s victories was the strike at a uniform factory, which followed the summer protests that had “empowered” the predominantly elderly female labor force according to reports from observers. I could clearly see the shattered windows and smoke stained walls of the small office located on my route to the Tren Urbano, the single line of light rail connecting Bayamón to Santurce. On another occasion, I heard the familiar protest chants from my mother’s fourth floor walk-up apartment one early morning. I wondered where it was coming from and asked around, including of seasoned activists “in the know.” Even they could not identify the source and they knew of no scheduled protest in the area. I believe the chants came from a nearby public school: with the support of teachers’ unions, community groups have been mobilizing against school shutdowns long before the non-Puerto Rican, U.S.-born Education Secretary, Julia Keleher was arrested on federal corruption charges just prior to the summer protests.
I learned of other protests connected more directly to the events of the summer. One Wednesday night a group of activists staged a “cacerolazo” outside the home of Junta president José Carrión III in the elite Condado sector of San Juan (cacerolazo is a widespread protest tactic throughout the Spanish-speaking world, where people in a certain area bang on empty pots and pans—symbolizing a lack of basic necessities—for a certain amount of time, creating a huge racket).
I learned that during the summer protests, people had participated in cacerolazos that rang throughout the Metro Area every night for the better space of an hour. I know firsthand how powerful this protest form can be. In 2011, I witnessed and participated in a cacerolazo in Barcelona, Spain, during the famous 15-M or Indignados movement. I experienced the intense sense of solidarity and belonging that is created when an entire urban area is flooded with the noise of people including those unable to
physically make it out to more conventional protest events, repeating the same simple motion with household items.
I also had the opportunity for participant observation at a demonstration organized by the Bayamón Asamblea de Pueblo at the Junta’s offices in the Hato Rey financial district. Born in the midst of the July mobilizations, the People’s Assemblies are an informal network of citizen groups that have been meeting more or less regularly in thirty-four urban areas throughout Puerto Rico to discuss immediate problems and plan mobilizations. Although they range in size from a handful of individuals to several dozen, some, like the Bayamón Asamblea, have been regularly gathering as many as fifty people, according to participants. At the picket-line style protest, I saw a handful of familiar faces but most demonstrators were new to me. The veteran activists offered support and assistance to the “self organized” groups, some of which seem to be directly descended from the community-based, self-help grassroots groups that emerged in the wake of Hurricane María to provide services neglected or abandoned by the local and federal governments. It is possible that the Asambleas de Pueblo are providing a restorative space for the fractured communitas torn asunder by Rosselló’s violation of public trust. These Asambleas may one day be an alternative source of political power, similar to those projects that followed the Spanish 15-M and U.S. Occupy movements, among others (Susser 2017).
Puerto Rico’s political culture has historically been complicated. If measured exclusively in terms of erratic and limited overt support for national independence, Puerto Ricans might appear to be a passive, apathetic people as compared to many of its Caribbean neighbors. However, as the late great Puerto Rican historian Fernando Picó observed in one of his last essays (2017), a long history of abusive “benign” neglect at the hands of the Spanish and U.S. governments as well as of local elites offer ordinary Puerto Ricans powerful reason to be suspicious of state-centric “solutions.” This includes being suspicious of independence, as contradictory as that may seem from an anti-colonial perspective. Perhaps Puerto Ricans might one day set in motion a more permanent structural, political-economic transformation, if they are given powerful enough reasons to abandon the status quo.
The Puerto Rican story of the last two decades may not be of the failure to rebel but of gathering forces and gradual, prolonged rebellion punctuated by some remarkable successes even as it is framed by structural obstacles. For example, in 2003 the U.S. Navy base and practice bombing range on the inhabited island of Vieques was permanently shut down in the wake of massive protests. Some might also consider the first phase of the 2010-2011 UPR student strike against austerity measures an equally significant if short-lived “success.” The protests leading up to Rosselló’s resignation is certainly a success by any measure.
It is possible that the demands, such as by striking workers, the symbols, such as the black-and-white flag, and activist organizational modes, such as the Asambleas de Pueblo, have been gaining traction all along and may continue to do so in the near future. My preliminary observations and conversations have helped me see the story of Puerto Rico this way. My long-term project will be to see how the situation plays out.
References
García-Quijano, Carlos, and Hilda Lloréns. 2019. The #RickyLeaks ‘Chat Bros’ group shows clear disdain towards Puerto Rico’s cultural values. Latino Rebels. https://www.latinorebels.com/2019/07/23/prculturalvalues/?fbclid=IwAR0ew_TkuXGV3wbOwR3pMkFqRg2FfD1ZGlKG6oE4eLMDNG1Z-znhQcddpE
Picó, Fernando. 2017. The Absent State and Five Books on Puerto Rican History. Radical History Review 128: 26-35.
Susser, Ida. 2017. Commoning in New York City, Barcelona, and Paris: notes and observations from the field. Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 79: 6-22.
José A. Laguarta Ramírez is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology. Among his publications is “Riding the Perennial Gale: Working Class Puerto Ricans and the Involution of Colonial Capitalism,” Dialectical Anthropology 42 (2): 117-129.
josé a. laguarta ramírez 